Marc Jacobs Packing His Louis Vuitton Bags After 16 Years

The designer Marc Jacobs, who joined Louis Vuitton in 1997, acknowledges applause after his final show for the company at the Louvre in Paris on Wednesday.Credit
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

PARIS — Marc Jacobs, one of the greatest American talents to conquer the perilous stage of French fashion with a 16-year career as the designer of Louis Vuitton, during which he produced megahit accessories and elaborate runway spectacles, is leaving the company to focus on his signature business in New York.

Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, said on Wednesday that the company has come to an agreement with Mr. Jacobs and that it plans to take the Marc Jacobs company public, possibly within the next three years. The Marc Jacobs business has been majority owned by LVMH for the last decade, and a public offering was described as a strategy to separate the Jacobs business from LVMH without requiring the designer to raise equity or take on other partners.

“When we started together, Marc Jacobs was a tiny little business of around $20 million,” Mr. Arnault said. “Now the totality of sales is approaching $1 billion. It has been an enormous growth.”

Mr. Arnault and other members of the Arnault family, including his daughter, Delphine, an executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, attended the company’s runway show on Wednesday morning, when reports that Mr. Jacobs, 50, would leave the company were first confirmed.

And it was clear to guests the moment they walked into the show, held in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, that it was intended as a statement that it was Mr. Jacobs’s last. Inside a large tent built especially for the show was a stage that included several elements from his elaborate shows of seasons past: a functional carousel on one side, a bubbling fountain on the other, as well as escalators, two antique elevators and a large railway station clock, a memory from a show in March 2012 during which a full-scale model train pulled onto the runway, and the floor of a hotel from last year’s show in March.

“It’s like a funeral,” said Edward Enninful, the fashion and style director of W magazine, as he entered the show.

The show was also an exquisite romp through the history of Mr. Jacobs at Vuitton, described by the designer as a tribute “to the showgirl in all of us,” with a combination of elaborate feather headdresses and black evening gowns with sheer insets and American sportswear looks, including loose jeans, football uniform pants and a varsity jacket that said “Paris” on the back. It began with a model who wore a transparent bodysuit with the name of the label written all over in a repeating black graffiti-style logo that was originally created by Stephen Sprouse for a Vuitton handbag design in 2000.

Those intentionally defaced handbags were both a metaphor for Mr. Jacobs’s irreverent approach to stuffy French fashion, and also among the most successful in the history of the company. Although a risky move, they re-established the label as a luxury powerhouse and spawned an international craze for Vuitton bags.

At the end of the show on Wednesday, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, led a standing ovation, an exceedingly rare event at fashion shows, and she was soon joined by the entire American press, as well as the Arnault family.

Backstage, Mr. Jacobs was ebullient, but he would not comment on his exit, beyond saying: “Farewell? I never say farewell.”

His departure had been expected for several months, though it was not clear until Wednesday that he was definitively leaving.

While Vuitton executives had been preparing for just that event, and are said to be courting the former Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière as a successor, they had simultaneously continued discussions with Mr. Jacobs until as recently as September. Last week, Reuters reported the fate of the contract negotiations, which began in January, was in doubt and noted the significance for a label that accounts for annual sales of nearly 7 billion euros (about $9.3 billion) and more than half of LVMH’s operating profits. Louis Vuitton’s growth, after years of annual gains of 10 percent or more, has slowed to 5 to 6 percent this year, while LVMH has not kept track with the broader European luxury sector, the Reuters report noted.

Also last week, Vuitton announced that it had hired Darren Spaziani, most recently the director of accessories at Proenza Schouler in New York, to develop a higher-end collection of accessories. Mr. Spaziani had also worked previously with Mr. Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and with Mr. Ghesquière at Balenciaga, prompting further speculation that a bigger change in creative direction was in the works. Editors and retailers reacted positively to the news after the show.

“Marc is absolutely significant to fashion,” said Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus. “But as we have seen at many other houses, designers have taken a hiatus or been replaced by other talents.”

“Fashion is an industry of change,” he added.

Mr. Jacobs, after a famously ill-fated early career at Perry Ellis, started his signature company 20 years ago and joined Vuitton in 1997 at the beginning of a period of rapid growth in the luxury sector. The period also marked the beginning of an intense competition between the two major luxury conglomerates, LVMH and Kering (formerly known as PPR, and before that Gucci Group), as they acquired virtually every historic fashion brand in Europe, as well as some in the United States.

Mr. Jacobs’s tenure at Vuitton became one of the most successful revivals of a historic French house, and the longest-running, apart from Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and Fendi, spawning what has become a standard business model to place contemporary designers at fashion labels. While Vuitton’s ready-to-wear has become a substantial business, its accessories have been the most important money makers for LVMH, including collaborations with Mr. Sprouse and the artists Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince.

The departure of Mr. Jacobs, who is also seen as a potential successor to Mr. Lagerfeld at Chanel someday, also comes during a Paris season that has been filled with great fashion moments and even greater intrigue. Executives on both sides have said privately over the last week that there had been tension between the designer and LVMH, with each side leaking details of its frustrations in order to manipulate the possible outcomes. But they ultimately reached an agreement that was in their mutual interests, they said.

Both LVMH and Kering are once again making investments in young designer labels at a rapid pace, with J. W. Anderson and the shoe designer Nicholas Kirkwood joining LVMH, and Joseph Altuzarra and Christopher Kane now linked with Kering.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jacobs, with his longtime business partner, Robert Duffy, has increasingly sought to develop the Marc Jacobs label and its lower-priced collections. During similarly fraught contract negotiations a decade ago, the team won significant commitments from LVMH, the majority owner of the brand, to further develop its retail and design.

The news of Mr. Jacobs’s plans come amid a flurry of I.P.O activity in the fashion industry. The apparel line Vince has filed for a stock offering, with plans to spin off from its holding company, the Kellwood European Luxury brand. Moncler also intends to float shares in an I.P.O. later this year, said a person briefed on its plans.

Wall Street bankers said that the success of Michael Kors’s I.P.O. is driving much of the interest in high-fashion stock. Shares of Michael Kors have tripled since December 2011, making it one of the most successful offerings in recent years. Mr. Kors made hundreds of millions of dollars taking his company public, and his private equity backers have made billions.

The potential of a Marc Jacobs public offering has been described as an opportunity for Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Duffy to further invest in their brand. But for that to happen, it was seen by executives on both sides as necessary for Mr. Jacobs to return full time to his own company.

Suzy Menkes and Peter Lattman contributed reporting.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on October 3, 2013, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Marc Jacobs Packing His Louis Vuitton Bags. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe